“… he devised his own biography, enlarging in poem after
poem on the character of a man who conceives of life as a
spiritual quest… ”

T.S.Eliot, during his lifetime, refused to allow anyone to
write an official biography. He was an intensely reserved
and private individual. And he was especially secretive
about his thirty-year friendship with Emily Hale, who
believed that he loved her and would eventually marry her.
The friendship survived Eliot’s refusal to marry Emily when
his first wife, Vivienne, died in 1947. But he broke off
all ties with her in 1956 when she gave her letters from
him to Princeton University Library. He required them to be
sealed until fifty years after the death of the survivor
(they become available in 2019), and it is thought that, at
the same time, he destroyed all the letters Emily had
written to him. Few people knew about this until Lyndall
Gordon began her research into Eliot’s life.

Others who believed themselves to be close friends, like
Mary Trevelyan and John Hayward, his “two closest friends
from the late forties to the mid-fifties”, also came to
realise how little they really knew Eliot. Yet, Lyndall
Gordon, using Eliot’s poetry and plays as her guide and
consulting as many primary sources as she could discover,
has done a superb job of writing a biography of this
secretive, difficult, imperfect and driven man.

Gordon began her research in 1970. Her first book,
Eliot’s Early Years, was published in 1977 and its
sequel, Eliot’s New Life, in 1988. This present book
is the result of further research and new information (much
of which came to the author in response to her earlier
publications), including new access to Eliot manuscripts;
confidential letters regarding Eliot written by Emily Hale
to close friends; Mary Trevelyan’s unpublished memoir of
her close friendship with Eliot; and a bundle of Eliot’s
letters which were rescued from an English pig farmer who
was about to destroy them.

I did not read Lyndall Gordon’s earlier books, so, much of
this book was new to me. I am consumed with admiration and
envy at the superb job she has done in recording Eliot’s
life through his poetry and plays in an easily readable,
knowledgeable, sensitive and objective style. It helps if
the reader knows Eliot’s poetry fairly well, but this is
not essential and in many cases Gordon’s comments elucidate
Eliot’s meaning and make his poetry more accessible to the
general reader.

Gordon points to two seminal moments in Eliot’s life as the
source of his lifelong quest: a moment of silence in a
Boston street in 1910, when he was suddenly convinced that
“life is justified”; and a similar moment years later in
the Rose Garden at Burnt Norton. These fleeting
apprehensions of something beyond the chaotic flux of daily
life, working on a man whose ancestry, upbringing and
education had fostered the religious and philosophical side
of his character, came to dominate his life. Through his
poetry, he struggled for understanding, for humility and
for blessedness. And his Puritanical zeal – his distaste
for worldly things – made him a sharp commentator on the
specific ills of the twentieth century. For many who bought
his poetry, and it was amazingly popular, his was a
prophetic voice decrying the evils which surrounded them.

Gordon makes no bones of Eliot’s anti-Semitism. She
comments that “biographers, of all people, know it is naive
to expect the great to be good”. And she points out that,
although anti-Semitism is often considered to be “a
commonplace of the time”, other writers of Eliot’s milieu
“countered it in different ways”. She points, also, to his
misogyny, his lack of sensitivity to the feelings of
others, and to his single-minded dedication to achieving
his own salvation.

In his dealings with women, and often in his depiction of
them in his work, Eliot is easy to fault. Yet Gordon
disposes of some myths surrounding his relationship with
his first wife, Vivienne, showing her to be a strong
influence on his work but a neurotic character. Her
eventual incarceration in a mental asylum, some time after
Eliot had left her, was the responsibility of her brother,
although Eliot did nothing to oppose it.

Gordon’s attribution of specific identities to some of the
women in ‘The Waste Land’ is more controversial. Ted
Hughes, for one, saw all these women as one woman – the
“essential female”; the desecrated “sacred feminine source
of Love”; the feminine aspect of Tiresius who, according to
Eliot, is “the most important figure in the poem” and in
whose voice he specifically notes that the women meet
(Hughes, A Dancer to God, Faber, 1992).

Gordon began, perhaps, by taking up Helen Gardner’s
suggestions, in The Art of T.S.Eliot (Faber, 1949),
that elements of Eliot’s poetry recall episodes in his
life, and that Eliot was a confessional and visionary poet.
Gordon elaborates these views with great skill, in great
detail, and with meticulous care to stay close to her
primary sources. She is acute in showing the persistence of
Eliot’s American origins both in his efforts to “make his
life conform to the pilgrim pattern”, and in the echoes of
place and voice which occur in his poetry. It was
fascinating to read, for example, that Ezra Pound noted the
rhythms of the Bay State Hymn Book of early
Massachusetts settlers in Eliot’s early poetic quatrains.

Half-way through Gordon’s book, I began to doubt some
attributions of specific biographical identities and events
to parts of ‘Four Quartets’, and I turned to Helen Gardner
for another point of view. Gordon notes that Eliot once
“confided to Helen Gardner that hers was the only criticism
of his work that he could recommend to anybody”. Certainly
there are differences in interpretation, and I like
Gardner’s statement that “the poem is not an allegory” and
that “precise annotation” may “destroy the imaginative
power”. But time and again I found that Lyndall Gordon was
sensitive to the dangers of reading Eliot’s work as an
allegory, and that she backed up her claims so well with
Eliot’s own comments or with quotations from his other
work, that her claims were valid. Her source references are
collected at the end of the text and arranged according to
page-numbers, which has the advantage that the reader is
not distracted by them but the disadvantage that, like me,
readers may not discover them until they are well into the
book.

Altogether, this is an interesting, informative and very
readable biography. Gordon does not claim to have fully
understood Eliot, only to have traced in his work some
dominant aspects of his character – to have followed “the
trials of a searcher whose flaws and doubts speak to all of
us whose lives are imperfect”. It goes some way towards
explaining how T.S.Eliot came to be so popular that in 1956
he attracted 13,700 people to a basketball stadium in
Minneapolis to hear him speak. And it confirms the belief
that for Eliot, as for all the greatest poets perhaps, his
art was an essential part of the attempt to resolve a deep
inner conflict which ruled his life.